To All Persons of JAPANESE Ancestry, Living in the Following Area.

“How you react to the Muslim ban today is how you would have reacted to the imprisonment of my grandparents and parents 75 years ago,” Representative Mark Takano, whose family was interned in the World War Two-era camps, said in Congress last month.”

Seventy-five years ago today, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which authorized the imprisonment of Japanese Americans.

Some 120,000 were held at 10 camps because of fears that Japanese Americans were enemy sympathizers. The United States had entered World War Two after Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor about three months earlier.

How you react to the Muslim ban today is how you would have reacted to the imprisonment of my grandparents and parents 75 years ago,” Representative Mark Takano, whose family was interned in the World War Two-era camps, said in Congress last month.

The internment of Japanese Americans in the United States during World War II was the forced relocation and incarceration in camps in the interior of the country of between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry who lived on the Pacific coast. Sixty-two percent of the internees were United States citizens.

Roosevelt authorized the deportation and incarceration with Executive Order 9066, issued February 19, 1942, which allowed regional military commanders to designate “military areas” from which “any or all persons may be excluded.” This power was used to declare that all people of Japanese ancestry were excluded from the entire West Coast, including all of California and much of Oregon, Washington and Arizona, except for those in government camps. Approximately 5,000 Japanese Americans voluntarily relocated outside the exclusion zone before March 1942, and some 5,500 community leaders arrested after the Pearl Harbor attack were already in custody. But, the majority of nearly 130,000 mainland Japanese Americans were forcibly relocated from their West Coast homes during the spring of 1942.

Check out this excellent article, Never Again! No To Muslim Interment, written by Nancy Reiko Kato which begins this way: “My parents’ families were interned in both those concentration camps during World War II. The U.S. government rounded up and jailed 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans for “posing a threat to national security.” The government knew there was no threat, but needed a scapegoat to rile up war hysteria. The imprisonment of Japanese farmers also enriched West Coast agricultural interests because their competition was eliminated.”

Ms Kato ends her article this way: “We are all Muslims.” Indeed “We are all Japanese Americans”; “We are all Orlando”; “We are all immigrants” because “Black Lives Matter.” We are a multiracial, multi-generational, international working class. Let’s link arms and stand together to stop the repression and violence against each and every one of our communities. The unbreakable bond of class unity will ensure that when the government comes for any one of us, we will all be there to fight back. This is the lesson that history teaches.”

The actor Gorge Takei was interned at the age of 5 along with his family. Check out the article How “America First” Puts Many of Us Last found HERE.

Mr. Takei says: Our president has trumpeted an “America First” policy, vowing to prioritize the well-being of the United States. But “America” doesn’t seem to include the brown-skinned, foreign-sounding or non-Christian people affected by his travel ban, his Mexico border wall or his immigration raids. When Trump labels them “bad hombres” or “terrorists,” he feeds a narrative of “us vs. them.”